There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you’re doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
Every time I set foot on that trail, I feel grateful for the PCTA for doing the work it does to protect and preserve it.
I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.
Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.
I’ve learned so much as both a writer and a human.
My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.
One thing any backpacker will tell you is that it’s tedious and monotonous. You’re bored sometimes, so you really have to make the fun in your head.
It’s still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.
In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
Can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.
Men’s stories are seen as universal, women’s as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.
When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.
Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it’s very hard work.
What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds.
Because when an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own humanity.
There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.
I was trying to find a new home in the world.
It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.
The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding.